Motivational Quotes

Acting and actors

The real actor has a direct line to the collective heart.

- Davis, Bette

Best Quotes about Acting and actors

I'm disappointed in acting as a craft. I want everything to go back to Orson Welles and fake noses and changing your voice. It's become so much about personality.

Ulrich, Skeet

We are born at the rise of the curtain and we die with its fall, and every night in the presence of our patrons we write our new creation, and every night it is blotted out forever; and of what use is it to say to audience or to critic, Ah, but you should have seen me last Tuesday?

Macliammoir, Micheal

The most minor gifts and not a very high class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four.

Hepburn, Katharine

After Blood Simple, everybody thought I was from Texas. After Mississippi Burning, everybody thought I was from Mississippi and uneducated. After Fargo, everybody's going to think I'm from Minnesota, pregnant, and have blonde hair. I don't think you can ever completely transform yourself on film, but if you do your job well, you can make people believe that you're the character you're trying to be.

McDormand, Frances

Celebrity is death --- celebrity -- that's the worst thing that can happen to an actor.

Cusack, John

Acting on a good idea is better than just having a good idea.

Half, Robert

You name it and I've done it. I'd like to say I did it my way. But that line, I'm afraid, belongs to someone else.

Davis Jr., Sammy

Acting is happy agony.

Guiness, Sir Alec

Actors are one family over the entire world.

Woodard, Alfre

10.

Every time I get a script it's a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It's like falling in love. You can't give a reason why.

Olin, Lena

11.

Ah just act the way ah feel.

Presley, Elvis

12.

I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.

Baldwin, Alec

13.

An actor is only merchandise.

Chow Yun-Fat

14.

I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.

Spacey, Kevin

15.

Acting deals with very delicate emotions. It is not putting up a mask. Each time an actor acts he does not hide; he exposes himself.

Moreau, Jeanne

16.

I'm not an actress who can create a character. I play me.

Moore, Mary Tyler

17.

If you have to be in a soap opera try not to get the worst role.

George, Boy

18.

Actors ought to be larger than life. You come across quite enough ordinary, nondescript people in daily life and I don't see why you should be subjected to them on the stage too.

Sinden, Donald

19.

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

Wilder, Thornton

20.

You can't do four movies and be good to everybody and be flying all night and shooting all day with a different wig and then be going to sing on Broadway without feeling a little tired. You endlessly feel you're letting somebody down.

Parker, Sarah Jessica

21.

I just stopped playing bitches on wheels and peoples' mothers. I have only a few more years to kick up my heels!

Lansbury, Angela

22.

Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant.

Jackson, Glenda

23.

Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.

Welles, Orson

24.

It's a business you go into because you're an egocentric. It's a very embarrassing profession.

Hepburn, Katharine

25.

I want to do a musical movie. Like Evita, but with good music.

John, Elton

26.

I don't do T & A very well because I haven't got much of either.

Leoni, Tea

27.

The great actors are the luminous ones. They are the great conductors of the stage.

Fiske, Minnie

28.

I'd prefer not to be the pretty thing in a film. It's such a bloody responsibility to look cute, because people know when you don't and they're like, They're trying to pass her off as the cute girl and she's looking like a bedraggled sack of potatoes.

Driver, Minnie

29.

I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again, night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.

Dundy, Elaine

30.

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.

Newman, Paul

31.

She represents the un-vowed aspiration of the male human being, his potential infidelity -- and infidelity of a very special kind, which would lead him to the opposite of his wife, to the woman of wax whom he could model at will, make and unmake in any way he wished, even unto death.

Duras, Marguerite

32.

A good many dramatic situations begin with screaming.

Fonda, Jane

33.

A lot of what acting is paying attention.

Redford, Robert

34.

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you -- tripping on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as Leif the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say, the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.

Shakespeare, William

35.

To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

36.

Do not try to push your way through to the front ranks of your profession; do not run after distinctions and rewards; but do your utmost to find an entry into the world of beauty.

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

37.

I find myself fascinating.

Dreyfus, Richard

38.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

Goldblum, Jeff

39.

Remember this practical piece of advice: Never come into the theatre with mud on your feet. Leave your dust and dirt outside. Check your little worries, squabbles, petty difficulties with your outside clothing -- all the things that ruin your life and draw your attention away from your art -- at the door.

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

40.

Oh! it offends me to the soul to hear a robust periwig-pated fellow, tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings.

Shakespeare, William

41.

If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.

Hepburn, Katharine

42.

The hardest part has been maintaining a small head--remaining down to earth. So many people try to make you more than you are. This business has changed a lot of good people and a lot of good families, and I don't want that to happen to me.

Brandy

43.

The actor's popularity is evanescent; applauded today, forgotten tomorrow.

Forrest, Edwin

44.

Unless the theatre can ennoble you, make you a better person, you should flee from it.

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

45.

In civilized life, where the happiness and indeed almost the existence of man, depends on the opinion of his fellow men. He is constantly acting a studied part.

Irving, Washington

46.

The actor searches vainly for the sound of a vanished tradition, and critic and audience follow suit. We have lost all sense of ritual and ceremony -- whether it be connected with Christmas, birthdays or funerals -- but the words remain with us and old impulses stir in the marrow. We feel we should have rituals, we should do something about getting them and we blame the artists for not finding them for us. So the artist sometimes attempts to find new rituals with only his imagination as his source: he imitates the outer form of ceremonies, pagan or baroque, unfortunately adding his own trapping -- the result is rarely convincing. And after the years and years of weaker and waterier imitations we now find ourselves rejecting the very notion of a holy stage. It is not the fault of the holy that it has become a middle-class weapon to keep the children good.

Brook, Peter (Stephen Paul)

47.

Actors are loved because they are unoriginal. Actors stick to their script. The unoriginal man is loved by the mediocrity because this kind of artistic expression is something to which the merest five-eighth can climb.

Kavanagh, Patrick

48.

You spend all your life trying to do something they put people in asylums for.

Fonda, Jane

49.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

Shaw, George Bernard

50.

An actor who knows his business ought to be able to make the London telephone directory sound enthralling.

Sinden, Donald